#mathmusic studies

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Reading the New Testament after watching The Chosen is so much fun—Jesus throws around titles like Son of Man so often, and now we have a better sense of how shocking/controversial/alarming that was at the time

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I've been studying the Old Testament this year, and I happen to be on Job today. I listened to it for the whole 2 hour drive back home from my parents' house today, and I have a few takeaways:

1. Job's friends were jerks

2. Job understood this, and I loved his response--he called them out on it, stood up for himself, and taught them the gospel

3. After listening to everyone else give their spiels, the youngest one in the group (Elihu) basically said "okay boomers, I've been sitting here waiting for you to finish this whole time, and the Spirit's telling me to speak up and I have thoughts, so listen up." And then basically says "God is awesome and the definition of goodness, so all y'all need to spend more time thinking about that instead of trying to sound all wise and crap." It was entertaining.

4. Then the Lord comes in and gives us some awesome tidbits about how involved He is in the lives of all His creations. And Job drinks his Respect juice. And the Lord reassures Job that he's good. And that his friends are jerks and need to repent.

5. They did repent in the end, so good on them

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For a long time I wasn't happy with the songs Spotify kept suggesting for me. Then I started a new job with open cubicles, so I started wearing headphones and turned up the volume a bit, and I found that there were entire layers of music I was missing before--what had sounded like monotonous repetitive songs had charming melodies and emotional base lines.

In my everything-relates-to-the-gospel little brain, I couldn't help but think about how the gospel feels like that sometimes, especially the scriptures. When I'm just trying to skim through for a quick read, it gets super repetitive and pretty boring. But when I take the time to really focus on it, to be still and listen even if it means blocking out some loud outside concerns for a few minutes, I find more hidden layers and deeper meanings to everything

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A friend asked me to share my favorite scripture :)

You know when you’re trying to read when you’re really tired and you have to read the same sentence like five times before it sinks in? It was one of those days.

I used to read two pages of the scriptures each day—just the left page and then the right page when I opened the book—and I was like eleven or twelve and tired and feeling sorry for myself for things that were happening in my life, so I read the first line at the top of this page like five times before I was awake enough to realize what I’d read.

Therefore, cheer up

The full verse is “Therefore, cheer up your hearts, and remember that ye are free to act for yourselves—to choose the way of everlasting death or the way of eternal life.” (2 Nephi 10:23). I realized that I couldn’t change the things that were happening in my life, but I could choose what to do about them—I could choose to be happy.

That verse has comforted me through a lot of hard times.

As Russell M. Nelson put it, “the joy we feel has little to do with the circumstances of our lives and everything to do with the focus of our lives.” (“Joy and Spiritual Survival”, 2016)

When we keep an eternal perspective and focus on the Savior, our trials and hardships get a little easier because we know it’s all for a reason, and someday we’ll be able to look back with perfect understanding and say “Oh, that’s why you asked me to do that.”

God is good. He won’t ever give us anything we can’t handle without His help. When we pray and do our best to get to know God, we'll start to see Him everywhere, and we'll realize He's been right there with us the whole time.

<3

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Alma Chapter 35 Summary

A group of people called the Zoramites had some missionaries visit, so some of them started reading the scriptures and converting to Christianity. Their local leaders got together and decided this whole love your neighbor thing was really messing up their business model, so they asked around to see who had converted and then ran them out of town.

The Zoramite refugees were taken in by their Christian neighbors, the People of Ammon, who had been refugees themselves after they were converted from the local war tribes.

The rest of the Zoramites were angry that the refugees were getting help, so they started threatening the People of Ammon. The People of Ammon were like "screw you, we'll help whoever we want to help".

So then the Zoramites were even more angry, and they went to the local war tribes and convinced them to start another war with everyone.

Nobody was happy about this, except apparently the war tribes and the Zoramites, who joined them and led their armies.

Meanwhile, the Zoramite refugees joined the rest of the country to defend their homeland. The People of Ammon had decided to take an oath of pacifism during their conversion process, so they couldn't fight, but the war was happening in their new village/town, so they had to evacuate again.

The prophet Alma saw all this happening and gathered his kids for a serious talk. The next several chapters are him telling his kids about his own conversion story and giving personal counsel to each of them as they were heading into difficult times.

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But If Not

I'd had a nagging thought recently as I've prayed for specific things to happen and added "but if it's not Thy will, please help us deal with it" at the end.

The most recent example of this was when my little toddler niece lost her precious purple hat at my parents’ house yesterday. We looked everywhere, including outside, and couldn't find it. While I was stepping through the brambly weeds in the hot afternoon sun, I silently prayed that we could find the hat—I know how important these things are to kids, and how much stress it can cause to parents, and my sister needs all the breaks she can get right now—but in my prayer I included that catch-all "but help us to deal with the fallout if not."

I wondered if including that phrase was an indication of a lack of faith that God would answer my prayer.

A few minutes later I admitted defeat and went back into my brother’s room to keep watching TV with him and the kids, but I looked around one more time, and there was the purple hat, crumpled up on the floor next to the bed. I said a little prayer of gratitude and my little niece was relieved to finally have her hat back.

Today I was reading "The Divine Gift of Forgiveness" by Neil L. Andersen, and in chapter 4 he quotes the Book of Mormon about the People of Ammon. These folks had been pretty wild and violent in the past, but when they were converted to the gospel, they decided that to keep from falling back into their old way of life, they wouldn't fight anyone ever again. Their neighbors were pretty upset with their new faith and highly likely to attack them, but the People of Ammon buried their swords so they wouldn't be tempted to use them, and after bearing testimony of God's grace, they said "if our brethren destroy us, behold, we shall go to our God and be saved."

That was not a lack of faith kind of statement.

Some of the People of Ammon did die in attacks, but the Lord helped the survivors get out of that situation and they found a new place to live. Many of their neighbors were so impressed by their convictions (and disturbed by their own actions) that they were converted to the gospel, too.

While I was re-reading that story, I was reminded of a bible study lesson I had in high school about the phrase "but if not" in the story about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego in Daniel 3. When these young men were about to be thrown into a fire for refusing to worship an idol, they said something along the lines of "we've been faithful, so God might save us (He definitely has the power to), but if not, we still won't break the commandments." When they were thrown into the fire, it was so hot that their executioners died, but the three young men were miraculously unharmed.

Esther had a similar line when she decided to slightly illegally go talk to the king to plead for the Jews. After telling Mordecai to ask people to fast and pray with her, she said she'd do her best, but “if I perish, I perish." In the end, she not only lived but was able to save her people, too.

There’s also Abinadi, another Book of Mormon hero who preached the gospel to the court of a very wicked king. When the king tried to interrupt him and have him executed, Abinadi was miraculously protected by the Lord. He said “Ye see that ye have not power to slay me, therefore I finish my message… and then it matters not whither I go, if it so be that I am saved.” He then prophesied that whatever would happen to him, the same would happen to the king, and he was right—Abinadi was executed a few days later, and in time, the king was similarly executed by his own people who’d finally come around to believe Abinadi’s words.

These four stories had various outcomes. Sometimes people were miraculously saved. Sometimes they weren't.

In my own (much less dramatic) life experiences, I've also seen a mixed response to my prayers.

But it was comforting to me today to realize that none of those “but if not” statements were made in a lack of faith—rather the opposite.

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Mosiah 7

I know it’s not the Bible, but the Book of Mormon has some great stories, too.

Take the book of Mosiah chapter 7. A guy named Ammon heads up a scouting party to go look for a group of people who’d left the main kingdom like 70 years earlier. After a long journey, Ammon and the scouts not only found the lost group, but the first person they walked up to happened to be the king out on a stroll.

So this King Limhi guy freaks out and throws them in prison for two days, and then when they’re called up to court he tells them that he wants to know why they were so bold as to approach him in broad daylight, and if he wasn’t so curious about it he absolutely would’ve killed them first thing.

Ammon’s first reaction, understandably, is to thank God (and the king) for sparing his life. Then he explains that he comes from their homeland Zarahemla to inquire about the group of people who’d left ages ago.

And King Limhi’s like “oh yeah, that was my grandpa” and then he’s like “Oh wait, y’all are from Zarahemla? Sweet! So you can totally free us from our oppressive taxing/warden/feudal lord neighbors! ‘Cause, uh, we’d literally rather be your slaves than stay here. This is so great! Hey, you, servant, call everyone here tomorrow! I’m making it a holiday! We’re gonna be freed!”

And we don’t get much of a description of Ammon’s reaction, but I imagine he’s gotta be like “uh, hang on, wait please, what exactly are you asking me to do???”

(King Limhi’s public speech the next day actually has a really cool testimony about trusting the Lord, but he also publicly makes the assumption that Ammon and his scouts are gonna help them fight their way out of the situation, so that was a thing haha.)

Eventually, Ammon and the other scouts help Limhi’s people sneak away back to Zarahemla where they become full citizens, and it’s all happy and good.

But man, those first few days must’ve been wild for poor Ammon trying to manage everyone’s expectations.

Like, “No, we don’t believe in slavery, please stop saying you'd rather be our slaves” and “you know, the more I hear about your history here, fighting really hasn’t worked out that well for you, has it? Can we just… run?”

There’s also this freedom-fighter-turned-general-turned-royal-advisor guy named Gideon (he's the one who actually suggested they all run), but he’s incredible and telling only part of his story wouldn’t do him justice, so I might get around to him later.

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Exodus 32

Poor Moses.

Here he'd just had all these incredible experiences with the Red Sea parting, the mana and quail appearing, the water coming out of the rock, and now he's even going back and forth between a mountain and the camp getting instructions directly from God. They build a portable temple/tabernacle. They make covenants. They're learning so much and it's amazing.

Then, at the end of a particularly long stay on the mountain, the Lord tells him that the Israelites have screwed up again and made an idol, so he's gonna destroy them all and start over fresh with just Moses.

And Moses is like "please don't?? Let me talk to them, I'm sure we can get this straightened out."

(And first of all, that's an awesome moment of love--Moses pleading for his people like that)

And then he gets back to camp and finds them enthusiastically worshiping a golden cow. That his brother made.

Moses: Aaron, what the crap??

Aaron: look, I'm SORRY, okay? I've been dealing with all these people by myself for weeks--you know what they're like! You didn't exactly leave a copy of your itinerary, Moses--we thought you were dead.

So it's a rough time. Moses does his best to fix things, and then goes to the Lord to beg for forgiveness on their behalf, going as far as asking that their punishment to be given to him personally.

The Lord says "It doesn't work that way, but thank you."

(Only the Savior was pure and perfect enough to suffer for our sins for us.)

They put the tabernacle outside the camp since the presence of the Lord would've been too much for the people to handle at the time, and life moved on, but I just really feel for everyone involved in that fiasco.

It's easy to fall back to what you know when you're in uncertain times, and having your leader/deliverer/prophet disappear into the desert for days/weeks, I could see why people would've lost hope. Not that it excuses them--they should (and therefore we should) have remembered the great things the Lord had done for them already, and trusted that He wouldn't just leave them high and dry like that. If we trust in the Lord and His timetable more than our personal expectations, He will never let us down in the long run.

A golden calf (aka whatever current popular practice that isn't in line with the gospel, e.g. porn, drugs, etc.) can't make that same promise.